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Wal-Mart's Data Obsession

Posted by timothy on from the what-do-you-want-today dept.

g8oz writes "The New York Times covers Wal-Mart's obsession with collecting sales data. Fun fact: 'Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.' That much information results in some interesting data-mining. Did you know hurricanes increase strawberry Pop Tarts sales 7-fold?"

2 of 581 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing to see here. Move along. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    But slashdot hid the story from me for 5 tries! Now I lost that boootiful first post I was gunning for!

  2. Curious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Just out of curiousity, what kind of server setups do some of the bigger gaming websites. Pogo.com, PartyPoker.com, and the likes of sites like that.. I know financial companies have to have pretty high end hardware due to all the regressional analysis/primarily computiationaly intensivei work done on enormous data sets.. But any of you have practical information on there sever setups.